Jeff Vrabel: Bacon app goes too far for this bacon lover

Monday

Mar 10, 2014 at 9:47 AMMar 10, 2014 at 9:47 AM

By Jeff VrabelMore Content Now

I’m not sure where the point is when something goes from being a fun, wacky diversion to an irritating thorn in the foot of society, but I’m a little afraid that’s what’s happening to bacon.Don’t get me wrong: I love bacon. I eat it all the time, because I make a habit of ignoring things my “doctor” tells me about “my cholesterol levels” and how they’re “dangerously high” and “how many more times do we need to go over this same information, Mr. Vrabel?” (Ugh, doctors and their complicated impenetrable vocabulary, how can I be expected to remember what is and isn’t “fatal?”)But I am a pitiful single-A bacon amateur when compared to my 10-year-old son, who eats bacon as though his life depends on it. He does that because his life depends on it: He eats about three other foods, and two of those are cereals (seriously, if it wasn’t for Lucky Charms, we’d need to sneak him foods in pill form while she slept) so we allow it. Also, bacon is super-easy to make, and by “make” I mean “microwave” because who has the time to do all that frying and preparing in the mornings? Sam’s Club sells pre-fried bacon in packs of 3,400 for about $5.99, so while I’m generally pretty invested in feeding my son healthy, life-extending breakfast treats, I’m prepared to make an exception for something that 1. He eats 2. I can buy with dollar bills and 3. Requires my putting about 12 of them on a plate in the morning to cook while I’m attending to find the other find to affix his pants.So, yeah, big bacon family here. (That younger child, by the way, has taken to dipping his bacon in the syrup I’ve provided for his pancakes, so I’m already signing him up for GT classes.) But we like bacon because it’s bacon. The Internet, by contrast, likes bacon because … well, I don’t really know why it likes bacon. It’s just something the Internet loves, like cats and fake nudes and deliberate misspellings.Which is why I blame the Internet for Oscar Mayer’s new Wake Up and Smell the Bacon alarm app, an actual thing that goes on your actual phone invented by actual Oscar Mayer (or at least many of his minions, because given the food his company invented there is no way that dude is still alive).The app works like this: First, you get a bacon-smell device. Then, you attach the bacon-smell device to your phone, and when your alarm goes off you enjoy not just the sound of sizzling bacon but also the smell of bacon, or at least the synthetic approximation of such as produced by a machine, which mm’mm good!Now here’s where I have to ask that you stop stampeding over your family and smaller pets to get to your car: You can’t just BUY the smellobacony thing, because we don’t live in that much of the future yet. You have to APPLY to be an Official Bacon Beta Tester, a process that includes an essay about how much you love Oscar Mayer bacon, which I think we can all agree is definitely a solid use of your time.BUT if you’re lucky enough to have an essay you wrote as a grown adult accepted by a sausage company, you win the chance to attach a bacon-scented device called a dongle to your phone! And as soon as you’ve finished the essay, the application, the winning, the getting the dongle in the mail, the attaching the dongle to your phone and the waking up, you can move onto something much more advanced, like frying some on your stove.Jeff Vrabel cannot imagine how a series of adults agreed on the name “dongle.” He can be reached at http://jeffvrabel.com and followed at http://twitter.com/jeffvrabel.